St. Tammany DA put the high in high school: James Gill

You don't wanna commit a crime in St. Tammany, because the DA over there is one tough hombre. You'll sit in prison for years ruing the day you ever messed with Walter Reed. Respectable citizens must thank their lucky stars for Reed, as he never tires of reminding them. He was at it again a few days ago, warning New Orleans riff-raff to stay on their side of Lake Pontchartrain or face dire consequences.

But thugs from the south shore are not the only threat to the suburban idyll. In the same speech, Reed announced that Mandeville High School students have taken to shooting heroin. This alarming news could only make the citizenry even more grateful to have such a hard-nosed lawman on their side. And the paper had a big story to check out.

St. Tammany Parish Superintendent of Schools Trey Folse was similarly nonplussed and hoped Reed would provide further information. Reed was not available that day, but his spokesman, Rick Wood, could not cite any charges and knew of no pending investigation at the school.

Reed had evidently been spinning a yarn, but that's what politicians do.

Reed decided to stick to his guns, and enlisted the aid of Mandeville Police Chief Rick Richard. In a joint press release, they averred that heroin use had too been reported at the school and that "a recent newspaper article incorrectly reported that the Mandeville Police Department disputed Reed's comments."

This, again, was news to Sticker, who said he had been accurately quoted and stood by what he had told the paper. He also vouched for the Reed/Richard press release, which just goes to show that rank is more potent than logic.

Rank may also come into play when the DA needs a boost from a small-town police chief. If Reed says heroin use is rampant at Mandeville High, it would be impolitic for Richard to contradict him. The question left unaddressed is why neither of them has done anything about it. In the release, Richard concedes that nobody has been arrested at the school, but says "intelligence reports" suggest students are doing heroin.

The conventional police approach is to gather information and keep it confidential until a bust is made. You wouldn't catch Eliot Ness issuing press releases to put suspects on their guard.

According to the release, Reed "referenced a recent synthetic heroin case" which required a student to be taken to the hospital.

But Folse, after reading the press release, repeated that neither he nor school administrators were "made aware of any alleged synthetic heroin use" at Mandeville High, and said he remains hopeful that the DA and the cops will clue him in on their intelligence. Mandeville High, he said, "has an excellent reputation across the parish, state and nation." Parish and state, fine. But nation? Sometimes it's hard to tell who's the fantasist around here.

Reed would certainly take some beating. Take, for instance, his claim a few years ago that his stepson received no preferential treatment when he was spared jail after drunkenly crashing a speedboat and killing his passenger. The merciless prosecutor briefly became a believer in redemption and a second chance.

Such wussy notions were long forgotten when Reed, Richard, Sheriff Jack Strain and Judge William Crain spoke to an approving Republican crowd April 26. Our heroes reveled in the severity for which St. Tammany courts are famous, and vowed to keep it up. Last year alone 23 life sentences were handed down in the parish, Reed proudly announced.

In a case that epitomized the St. Tammany concept of justice, Reed's office last summer invoked the state's multiple offender law so that a judge had no choice but to give a harmless young pothead life. That so offended any sense of fairness or decency that prosecutors were persuaded to do a deal that let him off with 25 years, which would still be regarded as excessive in any rational system.

If draconian sentences were supposed to keep such lowlife as heroin pushers at bay, they haven't worked. We have the DA's word for that.

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James Gill is a columnist for The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at jgill@timespicayune.com.